by David Weber
Chapter Seven
Vice Admiral Gold Peak stood in the late-night quiet of her day cabin in a pair of comfortably worn sweats and fluffy purple treecat bedroom slippers. Her shoulders were hunched, her hands were shoved deep into her sweat shirt’s pockets, and she glowered—undeniably, she glowered—at the outsized holographic display. One side of that display showed a detailed, if small-scale, schematic of the Spindle System; the other side showed a breakdown of her current fleet strength. If she’d cared to turn her head and look at the smart wall behind her, she would have seen a star chart of the entire Talbott Quadrant, as well. At the moment, however, she was concentrating fairly hard on not looking at that chart, since she found herself rather in the position of someone with insufficient icing to cover the birthday cake she’d just been given.
Hell of a birthday party, she reflected morosely, although to be fair it wouldn’t be her birthday—her sixty-fourth birthday, to be precise—for another two days. Given the amount of time she’s spent trundling around the universe at relativistic velocities, her subjective age was a god three years less than that, but no one worried about that when it came time to keeping track of birthdays. And the Royal Manticoran Navy used its own calendar, not someone’s subjective experience, to determine relative seniority, as well.
She considered that last point for a moment, then grimaced as she thought about the rank insignia sitting in the upper drawer of the desk behind her. The ones she would be allowed to officially pin onto her uniform collar in two days.
I can just see Beth grinning all over her face when she saw the official date of rank. Hell, for that matter I’ll bet she damned well had the original date changed to make sure it fell on my birthday! Just the sort of thing she’d do.
There could be disadvantages to being the Empress of Manticore’s first cousin and next in line for the crown after Elizabeth Winton’s two children and her brother. Especially for someone who’d spent her entire career aggressively fighting even the appearance of nepotism. She remembered the day her best friend had ripped a strip off of her for the way her avoidance of anything which could have been construed as preferential treatment had slowed her career, and the memory made her snort in amusement.
Well, I’ve made up for it since, haven’t I, Honor? Forty-one years from the Academy to vice admiral, then only eleven T-months to full admiral! Talk about a career catching fire. Of course, her amusement faded, it would have been nice if the rest of the galaxy hadn’t decided to catch fire right along with it.
She shook her head as the weight of those waiting admiral’s stars ground down upon her. She wondered sometimes if perhaps the real reason she’d so zealously avoided favoritism was because she’d feared the responsibilities that came with exalted rank and hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself. She’d certainly found herself wishing over the last year or so that she could have handed the ones currently bearing down on her to someone else.
She imagined there was a lot of that going around, too.
She inhaled deeply and gave herself an impatient shake. Brooding about the unfairness of the universe was about the least effective way of dealing with that unfairness she could think of, and she made herself re-focus her attention on the numbers and ship names before her.
While there might be a few people who suspected her rapid promotion was due primarily to who she’d chosen as a cousin, there were undoubtedly a lot more who saw it as a reward for Tenth Fleet’s smashing triumph in the Battle of Spindle. For that matter, there was almost certainly a political element in it, as well, since the promotion was yet another way for Empress Elizabeth—Michelle was still working on remembering her cousin was an empress these days, not “just” a queen—to demonstrate her approval and support for Michelle’s actions. A way to re-emphasize to the rest of the galaxy, and especially to the Solarian League, that the Star Empire of Manticore had no intention of backing down before the threat of the League’s massive economic and military power.
Michelle was confident her family connections had played the smallest part in the decision. She’d have been even happier if she could have been certain they’d played no part at all, but she happened to live in the real universe, and politics and diplomacy would always be politics and diplomacy. That was one reason she’d chosen the Navy instead of going into politics herself. Yet there was another aspect to it, as well, and she knew it.
If Elizabeth was going to retain her in command of Tenth Fleet (and it would have been impossible to relieve Michelle without looking like Manticore was backing down), Michelle needed the rank to go with the growing strength of her command. No less than four vice admirals, all senior to her, had been added to Tenth Fleet over the last month or so. It was always awkward when a junior commanded a senior, so the Admiralty had cut this particular Gordian knot by once again promoting Michelle “out of the zone.” Which was why in two days’ time she’d be exchanging the pair of stars on each point of her collar for a trio and replacing the three broad rings on her uniform cuffs with four. Which, at the tender age (for a prolong society) of only sixty-four, was a meteoric rise, indeed.
Unfortunately, even with the number of flag officers being added to it, Tenth Fleet remained badly understrength for its obligations. With upwards of a dozen star systems to defend, spread throughout an area of responsibility which stretched over two hundred and thirty light-years from the Lynx Terminus to the Scarlet System and four hundred from Tillerman to Celebrant, she could have wished for at least twice her assigned order of battle. And that would have been if she’d been worried about defending it against any reasonably sized foe, rather than the Solarian League. But whatever she could have wished, her total strength, after the dust settled, was only seventy-seven hyper-capable combatants. On the other hand, twenty of those were CLACs, which gave her just over two thousand light attack craft, and present-generation Manticoran LACs were nothing to sneer at. Especially against someone whose designs were as obsolescent—or even outright obsolete—as the SLN’s had demonstrated themselves to be. The Sollies still might not be prepared to accept that anything as small as a LAC could possibly threaten a capital ship, but if they did think that, and if they attempted to prove it, they’d be sailing into a universe of hurt. The only problem was that what happened to them wasn’t going to keep a lot of Michelle Henke’s spacers from getting killed right along with them.
And not a single Apollo-capable unit in sight, she thought glumly. Not one. Not that I can really argue with the Admiralty’s decisions after what happened to the home system.
None of the followup dispatches had made any effort to hide the terrifying severity of the blow Manticore’s industrial capability had suffered. The sheer scale of the Yawata Strike’s loss of life had been horrifying, but to make it even worse, it had been concentrated in the sectors of the Star Empire’s labor force most essential to supporting the Navy. Effectively, every Manticoran shipyard was simply gone. Even the production lines which had supplied the fleet with missiles had been destroyed. The ships Manticore had, and the missiles which had already been manufactured, were all the Star Empire was going to have for a long, long time, and the defense of the home system, its population, and what remained of its industrial base (not to mention the wormhole junction which was absolutely essential to Manticore’s strategic survival) had to take priority over almost any other consideration. Especially since Solarian strategic doctrine was uncompromisingly oriented around seeking a knockout blow by crushing the capital system of any star nation foolish enough to cross swords with the League.
Under those circumstances, the two squadrons of Keyhole-Two-equipped pod-laying superdreadnoughts Michelle had been promised had been recalled to the home system almost before they’d arrived in Spindle. Only ships with the Keyhole-Two control platforms could fully utilize the FTL telemetry links of the Mark 23-E multidrive missiles which were the heart of the Apollo system, and all of them—and all of the Navy’s existing store of Mark 23Es—were desperately needed to defend t
he Manticore Binary System.
In partial exchange, she’d gotten twenty Keyhole-One SD(P)s, and in terms of combat power, that was a pretty impressive consolation prize. No, they couldn’t use Apollo, but they could handle more missiles than any Solarian superdreadnought could even dream of firing, their own missile defenses were incomparably better than anything the other side might have, and while they weren’t equipped with the Mark 23-E control missiles, the standard Mark 23s in their magazines enormously out-ranged any Solarian weapon. Accuracy at extreme ranges was going to be much poorer than it would have been using Apollo, yet the missile storm they could bring down on any opponent would be devastating. And, fortunately, six T-months had passed between Haven’s Operation Beatrice and the Yawata Strike. The tempo of combat had dropped virtually to nothing during that time period, as well, which meant there’d been no real ammunition expenditures to cut into those six months worth of wartime-rate missile production. And that meant the Royal Manticoran Navy had a lot of those standard Mark 23s already produced and distributed to the fleet.
It wasn’t that Michelle entertained any doubts about what would happen to any Solarian admiral unwise enough to confront her combat power in space. The problem was that she had so much space to protect. She couldn’t possibly be everywhere she needed to be in sufficient strength to prevent an audacious Solarian flag officer from avoiding her combat power and carrying out devastating (there was that word again) raids on the infrastructure of the systems she was responsible for defending.
Then there was the interesting question of just what sort of reinforcements the Sollies might have en route to the Quadrant. And, for that matter, the even more interesting question (assuming her own suspicions about who’d been pulling the puppet strings behind the current catastrophe was correct) of what Manpower and Mesa might have up their collective sleeve.
And, finally, there was the body blow to the priority she’d been originally promised on the new Mark 16-equipped units.
News of the “Zunker Incident” had reached Spindle aboard a Navy dispatch boat only this morning, and Michelle found herself almost equally impressed by Captain Ivanov’s tactics and by the unwonted discretion shown by the Solarian flag officer involved. The confrontation had also confirmed—or reconfirmed, perhaps—the tactical superiority the Mark 16 conferred upon the RMN’s lighter units. Unfortunately, Michelle was certain there’d been other “Zunker Incidents” in the three weeks since the original, and every one of them would only increase Admiralty House’s demands for additional Mark 16-capable vessels. Especially given the decision to go ahead and implement Lacoön Two.
She could hardly fault the Admiralty for that priority, but Lacoön Two obviously required a lot of relatively fast, relatively well-armed hyper-capable platforms. Which, when she came down to it, was pretty much an exact description of the Nikes, Saganami-Cs and Rolands. Which, in turn, explained why the light combatants she’d expected to see were now going elsewhere at high rates of speed.
It’s an imperfect universe, Mike, she told herself tartly. Deal with it.
She snorted again, then squared her shoulders, hauled her hands out of her pockets, turned and marched back to her workstation. She picked up the cup of coffee Chris Billingsley had left for her and settled into her work chair. She and Augustus Khumalo were scheduled to meet tomorrow with Governor Medusa, Prime Minister Joachim Alquezar, Minister of War Henri Krietzmann, and the other senior members of Alquezar’s war cabinet to discuss her new deployment plan. Under the circumstances, she thought as she started punching up the appropriate files, it probably behooved her to have a deployment plan to discuss.
* * *
“So that’s about the size of it, on the housing side, at least.” Henri Krietzmann looked around the Governor’s House conference room in the planetary and quadrant capital of Thimble and shrugged. “It’s only been seven weeks since O’Cleary’s surrender, so despite Admiral Bordelon’s protests, we’re actually doing pretty damned well, I think. Especially considering the fact that we’re not the ones who went and invaded their star system!”
“Surely you don’t expect Bordelon to admit that, do you, Henri?” Baroness Medusa observed tartly.
Most of the people seated around the long table grimaced, but she had a point. With Admiral Keeley O’Cleary’s departure for Old Chicago, and the deaths of Admirals Sandra Crandall, Dunichi Lazlo, and Griseldis Degauchy in the Battle of Spindle, Admiral Margaux Bordelon had inherited command of the surrendered personnel of SLN Task Force 496. Judging from her own conversations with Bordelon, Michelle Henke was confident the Solarian officer would have declined the honor if she’d had any choice.
Any impartial board of inquiry would have to conclude that Bordelon bore no responsibility for what had happened to Crandall’s task force. She might not have covered herself with glory, but Michelle doubted any Battle Fleet flag officer was likely to have accomplished that. As far as the battle itself was concerned, Bordelon had done precisely what she’d been ordered to do, and she’d conducted herself in punctilious accordance with the Deneb Accords since becoming senior officer of the Solarian POWs. None of which was likely to cut any ice where the consequences to her career were concerned. As TF 496’s two surviving senior officers, she and O’Cleary could pretty much count on being scapegoated for the deceased Crandall’s mistakes, unless their own family connections were lofty enough to avoid that fate.
It seemed unlikely they could be, in O’Cleary’s case, since she’d been the one to actually surrender to the handful of cruisers which had ripped Crandall’s SDs apart, but there might be some hope—careerwise, at any rate—for Bordelon. After all, she wasn’t the one who’d “cravenly” (to use what appeared to be the Solly newsfax editorials’ favorite adverb, although “gutlessly” seemed to be running a close second and “pusillanimously” was clearly in contention, as well, at least for newsies with impressive vocabularies) surrendered. And she obviously intended to be as inflexible as possible in demanding Manticore meet the Deneb Accords’ obligations to properly “house, feed, and care for” prisoners of war. The fact that there were the next best thing to half a million of those prisoners, and that they’d arrived with absolutely no warning, couldn’t mitigate those obligations in any way, as far as Bordelon was concerned. She not only repeated her demands for “adequate housing” at every meeting with any of Medusa’s or Krietzmann’s representatives but insisted her protests against her personnel’s “mistreatment” be made part of the official record.
Clearly, she hoped her demands that her people should be properly treated (and the clear implication that they weren’t being) would produce the image of a decisive flag officer, refusing to buckle before the brutality of her captors, despite the situation she faced through no fault of her own.
Michelle liked to think she would have had more on her mind than career damage control in Bordelon’s place. In fairness, though, she had to admit there wasn’t a lot else for Bordelon to be worrying about at the moment. Particularly since the Solarian knew perfectly well that Medusa and Krietzmann were doing everything humanly possible to see to her people’s well-being. And it wasn’t as if any of the Solarians were actually suffering. The islands Prime Minister Alquezar had designated as POW camps were all located in the planet Flax’s tropics. With the moderating effect so much ocean exercised on temperature, those islands came about as close to having perfect climates as was physically possible. That might change during hurricane season, but hurricane season was months away, and proper housing and other support facilities were being constructed at an extraordinarily rapid pace. Yes, the majority of Bordelon’s personnel were still under canvas, yet that was changing quickly, and not even Bordelon could complain about the food or the medical attention.
“No, I don’t suppose I should expect her to admit it,” Krietzmann said now, in response to Medusa’s comment. “Doesn’t make me any less tempted to wring her neck every time she opens her mouth, though!”
Krietzman
n’s Dresden accent was more pronounced than usual, and Michelle wondered if that was intentional. As the Quadrant’s Minister of War, he was directly responsible for the coordination, maintenance, and management of the various planetary militias and the Quadrant Guard local defense force organized under the Quadrant’s Constitution. It was a new departure for the Manticore, but some the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had argued in favor of a locally raised and maintained military force to serve as backup for the Royal Navy, and the Grantville Government had agreed to it. For one thing, it would ease the burden on the Navy and the Royal Marines considerably, The Quadrant would also be responsible for maintaining the Quadrant Guard out of local tax revenues, which would prevent it from becoming a charge on the imperial treasury. And, finally, Grantville’s agreement had recognized the unspoken truth that the maintenance of a local force would help Talbotters sleep more soundly at night. Not only would it insure that OFS wouldn’t come calling while the rest of the Star Empire was distracted elsewhere, but it had been something of a sop to any local fears of “Manty tyranny” from the Old Star Kingdom’s direction.
At the moment, however, it was Krietsmann’s Guard which had responsibility for security where the POWs were concerned. That was enough to make Bordelon’s protests especially irritating to him all by itself, but that particular irritation wasn’t by itself. For some odd reason, TF 496’s unprovoked onslaught on their capital system hadn’t made Talbotters in general any fonder of Sollies, and Dresden’s hatred for all things Solarian had burned hotter than most to begin with.
“I trust you haven’t been as…forthright with Admiral Bordelon as you are with our cabinet colleagues, Henri,” Minister of the Treasury Samiha Lababibi said dryly, and Krietzmann snorted a laugh.